Long before a frame of it was fed through a projector, "The
Gate of Heavenly Peace" had incited the kind of publicity that
money can't buy. There was buzz, and the buzz was angry, ugly,
personal. Rumors in the dissident Chinese press of what might be
distorted (or revealed) about certain individuals involved in the
bloody rebellion at Tiananmen Square in 1989 were enough to
generate a stack of irate reviews.

Patrick Tyler put an innocent stick in this nest with a piece
in
The New York Times
on April 30, 1995. After seeing a rough cut, he reported on the
documentary's upcoming release and its mildly revisionist views
on the tactics and heroism of some of the students. On May 28th,
an article in the
South China Morning Post
appeared about "possible legal action" against the film from
Chai Ling and Li Lu, two of the most visible students who had
escaped from China to the U.S. And by June, several veterans of
'89 had issued summary verdicts in the Chinese dissident magazine
Tiananmen
, certain they needn't view the film to condemn it (and
Tyler).

"They [the producing and directing team of Carma Hinton and
Richard Gordon] are a bunch of opportunists," wrote Bai Meng, who
had manned the public address system in the Square. "As long as
they call themselves intellectuals, their flagrant distortion of
history is a criminal act... They are a bunch of flies. They are
the true disease of our era."

The Chinese government didn't see the film either. But they
did their bit to promote it, too, barring director Zhang Yimou
from leaving China for the American premiere of his "Shanghai
Triad" last September at the New York Film Festival because "The
Gate of Heavenly Peace" was also scheduled. The NYFF refused to
pull the film and screened it publicly for the first time
anywhere on October 14. But at nearly every festival where the
film was submitted, China seems to have strong-armed organizers
to suppress it. The head of the Berlin Film Festival, after
calling Hinton and Gordon to rhapsodize about the film, comparing
it favorably to "The Sorrow and the Pity," abruptly turned it
down after the fuss in New York.

All of this furor should have been good for business. Using
the NYFF showdown as a peg,
Time
and
Newsweek
wrote stories and praised the film's evenhandedness. And were it
a feature about religion or sex, maybe it could have been sold as
a juicy scandal like "Hail Mary" or "Basic Instinct."

Too bad "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" is only a profound
meditation on revolutionary politics that indirectly delivers a
withering critique of the ability of American news networks to
interpret a complex, developing story far beyond its borders.
Edited to a large degree from TV coverage of the Tiananmen
Massacre, the film likely won't have the theatrical showing it
deserves. The exorbitant cost of licensing this footage from the
networks (and the prior release of the ludicrous "Moving the
Mountain," which covers some of the same ground) means that "one
of the great documentaries of the last 20 years" (so sayeth
Charles Taylor in
The Boston Phoenix
) [
Gate of Heaven, The Boston Phoenix, Jan. 5, 1996] will be restricted to not-for-profit venues.

The rockets of invective aimed at "The Gate of Heavenly Peace"
from across the Pacific and from there in the U.S. may puzzle
some who tune in next Tuesday for the PBS broadcast, an abridged
two-and-a-half hour version of the three-hour original. The style
of the film certainly can't be called provocative. There is no
hokey reenacting or Oliver Stone-like monkey business with
recorded history.

The cinema of Hinton and Gordon has always been reserved and
conservative, more steak than sizzle. Their series of
award-winning documentaries shed light on daily life in a Chinese
village without pyrotechnics. Notwithstanding its monumental
scale, cast of millions, and attempt to condense 70 years of
Chinese revolutionary politics, this latest effort doesn't draw
attention to itself either.

A sober analysis of the heady Beijing spring of '89, when
seven weeks of peaceful protest were crushed by the tanks of the
People's Liberation Army, "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" is a
painstaking, almost day-by-day reconstruction of the April
15-June 4 events in and around Tiananmen, as shaped by the
actions and words of students, workers, intellectuals, and
government officials, many of them playing to the cameras, and as
these events are now recalled by as many principals as could be
rounded up. Although in many ways about the lingering power of
images and ideology, the film is dominated by its reflective,
articulate talking heads, whose words are translated in English
voiceover. The grave narration by ABC news correspondent Deborah
Amos serves as a guide through the ruins for foreigners, but
nearly everyone else on the soundtrack speaks - or sings - in
Chinese.

And yet despite its unflamboyant manner, this may well be the
most incendiary film of the year. From the editorial pages of the
Washington Post
and
L.A. Times
to journals out of Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.S., and China, the
film has been argued over, denounced, and extolled, as often as
not by those who haven't seen it. Even the human rights community
was at one point up in arms. After Tyler's article, Robert
Bernstein, the chairman of Human Rights Watch, tried to bully the
filmmakers into interviewing one of his favorite dissidents, Li
Lu. The debate has even reached into the status of intellectual
cliché, spilling into the letters pages of the
New York Review of Books
, where Hinton and Gordon mixed it up with Ian Buruma. [Both the
directors' letter and Ian Buruma's reply
are available on this website.]

Now that the revolution will be televised, many more can take
sides and at least know what they're talking about. As a bonus,
to coincide with the June 4 broadcast on the seventh anniversary
of the troops' retaking of Tiananmen, America On-Line has
declared the documentary's address (WGBH.org/frontline) its
Website of the day. Those with a hearty appetite for the topic
can download nearly a thousand pages of documents plus film and
audio clips amassed while researching the film, an encyclopedia
on the spring of '89.

It takes a special gift to piss off the Chinese government and
many of their sworn ideological foes among the leaders of the
rebellion and pillars of the American human rights establishment
and your own father. But it's a role that Carma Hinton was born
to play. Born and raised in China, a teenager during the Cultural
Revolution, she is the daughter of William Hinton, author of the
classic agrarian study, Fanshen, who still deeply admires Mao and Zhou Enlai. This association
has given some students all they need to discredit the film. Bai
Meng dismissed Carma Hinton as "an American who grew up in China
like a privileged aristocrat and maintains deep ties at the
highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party." No doubt
surprising news to Deng Xiaoping, and Li Peng, and the filmmakers
themselves.

"The Gate of Heavenly Peace" is anything but Hinton's
psychodrama, however, or an academic exercise. As China has
vaulted over the dismantled Soviet Union to assume its place as
the chief foreign policy concern of the U.S., the question of
what happened at Tiananmen, and why, is vital for dealing with
the sclerotic leadership still in charge.

"The whole Democracy Movement is the key to understanding
China today," says Xiao Qiang, New York director of Human Rights
in China. "The government showed they have no legitimacy except
brute force. Everything they do now is designed to reestablish
legitimacy. They can't have open discussion of the events. That
would lead people to ask who was responsible for the massacre and
that would lead to the collapse of the Communist Party."

The reaction to the film among some who bravely opposed the
government, however, leads one to wonder if they are any more
ready to engage in critical debate. Was reform achievable in '89
until it was derailed by a radical faction? Or, as Buruma
suggests, is reform of a totalitarian regime an oxymoronic
fantasy? Did Chai Ling, the young woman on every TV station
during and after Tiananmen, break faith and encourage the
bloodbath? Or is it unfair to question the motives and tactics of
Antigone when the state looms as the obvious oppressor?

Not the least remarkable aspect of "The Gate of Heavenly
Peace", which in historical sweep and nuance does bear comparison
to "The Sorrow and the Pity," is its examination of this
worldwide media event as a drama of tragic dimensions. The film
argues that '89 must be seen in the context of Chinese history, a
history that many Americans mistook as a mirror of their own.

Yet at the same time anyone with scars from mass protest -
whether antiwar, civil rights, SDS, prochoice, prolife, ACT UP,
or Solidarity - will feel the shock of recognition. All activists
have to calculate: Do we keep pushing for change and risk a
violent backlash? Or should we settle for incremental gains that
may prove to be a sham? The Chinese students miscalculated, and
at least 300 people (according to students, thousands) were
killed. The film replays this familiar carnage. But more
poignantly, it documents the euphoria one can feel when the state
gives way to mass resistance, the fatigue of infighting among
strategists, and the bitterness and second-guessing that go on
when the dream dies.

Those who watched and cheered the protesters from afar,
thinking they say their younger selves flickering on CNN, may
discover, after a look here at the ways defiant idealism can
sometimes darken into blind folly, that they were more right than
they ever wanted to know.

The headquarters of Long Bow in Brookline, Massachusetts, is a
rickety shrine to Chinese pop culture and American information
technology. A swaybacked, three-story gray house in a bucolic
setting, it could be the off-campus hangout for wiseass M.I.T.
undergrads. Mao memorabilia and kitsch cover the walls: Young Mao
going to organize the workers, Mao greeting Elvis, Mao morphed
with Marilyn or with Mona Lisa. Desks are strewn with Web manual
and topped by aging desktop computers. On the stairs lies a copy
of The Sayings of Pat Buchanan, which blends with the decor only because of its pungent title:
"Deng Xiaoping is a chain-smoking, Communist dwarf."

Major money went into this operation. The documentary had
funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, NEH, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (ITVS), and $150,000 from MCA
Universal Studios. (By contract, Universal and Amblin, Steven
Spielberg's company, still own rights to any toys or amusement
parks spun off the project.) A $25,000 AVID digital video-editing
machine occupies a room upstairs. Otherwise, little of the $1.6
million that it cost to make the film is still evident. The motto
at Long Bow: "Another day's work, another day deeper in
debt."

"We have news," says Richard Gordon, bounding down the stairs
and handing me the latest "review." An enthusiastic, funny,
easily distracted man of 42 (his nickname for himself is "Aunt
Blabby"), Gordon shoots and co-directs all the films that he
works on with Hinton, who is upstairs on the phone talking to a
reporter in San Francisco. (The couple live with their two
children 15 minutes away in Dorchester.)

The "review" comes from the Embassy of the People's Republic
of China in Washington, D.C., the first time the government has
dared put its views on paper. Composed on what one of the film's
writers, Geremie Barmé, calls "a really bad typewriter, a
Unabomber typewriter" and sent to the director of the Washington
international Film Festival, the letter urges removing the
offensive work from their April schedule.

"As is well-known, a very small number of people engaged
themselves in anti-government violence in Beijing in June 1989
but failed," writes an embassy press officer. "The film the Gate
of Heavenly Peace [sic] sings praise of the people in total
disregard of the fact. If this film is shown during the festival,
it will mislead the audience and hurt the feelings of 1.2 billion
Chinese people."

Everyone in the house is delighted to have a smoking gun,
especially Barmé. An erudite Australian academic with a
reputation for seditious mischief (and arrogance) in his field of
contemporary Chinese studies, he had flown to "Gulag Long Bow" to
help with the Web page, which includes an interactive Tiananmen.
(Click on Mao's mausoleum ion the Square and learn of its
elevator, which takes the corpse up and down every day from the
hall into an earthquake-proof chamber. Or stroll the Square as a
"normal" or a "revolutionary" tourist.) Gordon's job among the
film's opinionated collaborators was to speak up for "Joe Blow,"
the viewer who wouldn't know the many players or the subtle codes
in which they speak; Barmé admits he "doesn't give a fuck
about Joe Blow." Scornful of those who have credulously accepted
Chai Ling's and Li Lu's version of events and embraced them as
innocent martyrs, he wanted to call the film "Merchandising the
Massacre."

He fires off Long Bow's reply: "Whereas we are heartened by
any efforts of the diplomatic corps to engage in amateur film
criticism and historiography, we feel that it is important that
their naive enthusiasm not cloud the serious issues on which they
choose to comment." Bewildered by this "handful of people," he
cites the Beijing Evening News, which reported on August 3, 1989, that it took 156,000 people
to wash away the 30,000 slogans and pick up the 80 tons of bricks
after the disturbance. Then he e-mails both letters to friends in
Australia where that night the futile effort to ban the film is a
story again. CNN and the Washington Post also pick it up. Against an opponent that relies on such crude
tools to stanch the flow of unwelcome information, the filmmakers
have the Western media, as well as a better grasp of the truth,
on their side. It almost isn't a fair fight.

Visitors to Long Bow, though, can check their David and
Goliath metaphors at the door. Gordon, Hinton, Barmé, and
the film's other writer, John Crowley, are good postmodernists.
The narration subtly explores how tropes and rhetoric shape our
understanding of the news and history. To accompany the famous TV
footage of the young man facing down the tank in the streets of
Beijing, reported quite differently by Dan Rather and Chinese
commentators, the voiceover cautions that "events do not deliver
their meaning to us. They are always interpreted." No one who
worked on "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" would deny his or her role
as mediator either. They began on the assumption, says Hinton,
that "China needs fundamental reforms."

According to Barmé, it was Gordon who brought "the
visual sense, the eye for the absurd detail" to the film. (A
goofy clip of Bob Hope singing atop the Great Wall, sashaying
through Tiananmen, golf club on his shoulder, is unmistakably
Gordon's work.) Hinton, on the other hand, has "an exhaustive
knowledge of China and an exhausting need to be fair," says
Barmé dryly. "Carma wanted every event to be contextual.
Richard knows that you have to tell history on film through
images. He helps her focus. It's symbiotic. But it can be tense
to be around when they're working together."

As she summarizes it one afternoon around Long Bow's kitchen
table, "All the boring historical analysis is my fault. All the
fun and interesting material that people actually like to watch
is Richard's."

Four years older than her husband, Hinton is an impressive
figure - beautiful, if severe. With her fast gait, little or no
makeup, and cropped hair, she seems without pretension or time to
waste. When not attending to her two children or this consuming
project, she has been finishing her doctoral thesis in art
history at Harvard (the topic is demons in 15th-century Chinese
scroll painting).

I had seen Gordon and Hinton at the NYFF press conference
after the first screening, and I went to the China Institute in
February when she screened a section of the film by herself. Both
times I was struck by her speech - the rapid cadences and dropped
articles give her away as one who speaks Chinese more fluently
than English - and by her candor about the failing of her film
and the documentary form in general.

At the China Institute, she showed video clips of two Chinese
students describing the same April 20 "atrocity" (when they
petitioned the leaders inside Xinhuamen with demands and were
rebuffed by guards). Only one student, Wuer Kaixi, made the final
cut, however, because, as she said with chagrin, "He is more
emotional and he turns up at other times throughout the film. We
would have shown both clips, but the sky had changed color. We
took the least bad path."

Beginning the project with misgivings ("I knew you couldn't
satisfy any of the factions"), she had decided it needed doing
while watching American TV coverage of '89 in Boston. Her
frustration and anger only grew while reviewing archival footage.
"The news focused on slogans about democracy," she told the room
at the China Institute. "I noticed that almost no Chinese people
who were interviewed in the Square had a chance to finish a
sentence, much less a thought."

The interviews she conducted for "The Gate of Heavenly Peace"
are her way of filling in at least some of the record, even if
she herself now feels trapped by the compromises of telling
history with a camera. "Film is better suited to action than cool
debate," she said, making it clear which she prefers, "and
whatever happens on camera carries more weight than events off
camera."

Over lunch in a deli not far from Long Bow, Hinton related
pieces of her own history, a saga unto itself. her left-wing
roots are wonderfully bizarre. A great-aunt, Ethel Voynich, wrote
the 1897 novel, The Gadfly, which, although written in English and set in 19th-century
Italy, became a bestseller, during the '50s, in the Soviet Union.
It was translated into 18 Soviet languages and became a movie and
an opera. "Everyone there of a certain age knows it," Hinton
assures me.

Her grandmother, Carmelita Hinton, for whom she is named,
founded the progressive-minded Putney School in Vermont. Her
parents met there. William Hinton read Edgar Snow's
Red Star Over China and set off in 1945 to work in China with the U.S. government's
Department of War Information. He learned to admire Mao and Zhou,
then still holed up in the hills. In 1948 his wife joined him;
and a year later - two months after Mao declared the People's
Republic in Tiananmen Square - Carma was born, a revolutionary
baby.

"Even though I had friends, I was constantly made aware that I
didn't belong," says Hinton of a foreign childhood complicated
further by her parents' estrangement soon after her birth. (She
did not see her father for 18 years. He returned to the U.S. in
1953 just in time for the McCarthy era. His passport was
confiscated along with a footlocker of notes he had taken about a
Chinese village called Fanshen, or Long Bow. After the obligatory
HUAC showdown, he sued the government for his papers and wrote
his book in the U.S., returning to China in 1971 as a hero.)

A teenager in Beijing when Mao unleashed the Cultural
Revolution in 1966, Hinton was thrilled to learn from the
denunciation of old leaders that not all Communists were correct:
"That was a revelation." She lacked a cadre pedigree to qualify
as a Red Guard, but she wrote posters, left school, and traveled
to the countryside. "The Cultural Revolution fed our
anti-authoritarian feelings. It was like a vacation. There was
supposed to be freedom now to create. And what did they create?
Terror."

In the behavior of Chai Ling and others in the Square during
'89, Hinton recognizes many of the same slogans and attitudes
from her teenage years. "During the Cultural Revolution, we
didn't take a single step to build anything up. There was no
school. We had a ball. We learned that everyone should have a
say. But then what? We never got around to creating structures.
Did we change anything except attack?"

"The Democracy Movement in '89, same thing. They could only
shout slogans about revolution again. That's the only language
they know. Everyone wanted to go straight to the top and tamper
with national politics, instead of doing hard, practical work for
democracy on a local level. Partly because of Communism, people
don't know how to talk to the government, and the government
certainly doesn't know how to talk to them."

Hinton viewed the Chinese leadership close-up in 1971 when she
reunited with her father, who took her to Fanshen/Long Bow. She
sat in on five meetings he had with Zhou Enlai, some lasting all
night. But the chief lesson she took away from the experience
was: "Every political leader has to be smooth and diplomatic and
can't tell the truth."

Disillusion with China led her to leave soon afterward (she
arrived in Hong Kong the day Kissinger's visit was announced.) At
the University of Pennsylvania, where she met Gordon, she planned
to be an artist but "couldn't find a voice that was meaningful."
Not until she and Gordon returned to Long Bow in 1979 to make a
film on stilt dancers did she recover her feelings for the
country. She also hit upon a career. They have returned to the
village every couple of years to make four other films, all of
them grounded in the routines and texture of daily life.

Given that Hinton has quite deliberately followed in her
father's footsteps, I was curious what he thought of the film. I
knew the two had serious political differences. "He doesn't like
it," she says with a touch of exasperation as she hands me his
number and fax in Outer Mongolia, where he lives with his new
wife. "But I've learned not to speak for him."

I had never called Ulan Bator before and I wasn't sure phones
would reliably connect me. But William Hinton picked up on the
second ring and, after turning down the television, proceeds to
praise the film ("the best thing that's been done") and then run
it down.

"The unrest was much greater all over China than anyone could
get on film," he says in a hearty voice. "Carma wasn't here. I
was. I thought the blame for what happened should have been
squarely on Deng. It's true the students were provocative. But
the government should be much more mature and far-seeing. You
don't slaughter your own people. They lost 50 years of love and
prestige with that move."

His objections rhyme with those voiced by many of the student
writers of Tiananmen, with a macabre twist. William Hinton sees
Deng as the villain, too, but mainly because of his capitalist
reforms. It's clear I have entered a time tunnel when I ask if he
minds being called "an unrepentant Maoist."

"What's to repent?," he thunders. "Mao had nothing to be
ashamed of or be sorry for. Mao was struggling hard for a
Socialist China and was defeated. One of the problems with the
film is that Carma didn't find anyone who admired Mao. There are
a lot of cheap shots at him in the film.. Among the peasants
Mao's prestige was and remains very high."

This is only too true, as Shades of Mao, Barmé's new book on the post-'89 nationalist cult of the
Great Leader, documents. But even if many viewers bring to "The
Gate of Heavenly Peace" their own agenda, few are likely to share
William Hinton's belief that the ultimate blame for the bloodbath
lies not with Mao and his legacy of terror, but with Deng, who
betrayed the revolution.

At one level the film reveals the grotesque miscommunication
that took place at Tiananmen. The aging Communist hard-liners,
living off waning revolutionary energy, couldn't help but see any
questioning of its authority as "counterrevolutionary" or, in the
stock denunciation of the late '80's, "bourgeois liberalism."
Neither the students nor any other group had avenues to petition
for reform and so, finally, they took to the streets. But as the
film eloquently says: "When individuals stand up to power, they
bring to the encounter the lessons that power has taught them,
and the harm it has done them. Merely to stand up does not free
us from these things."

Not that anyone at Long Bow is a relativist. The scholarly
credentials on the film are impeccable. Orville Schell was a
producer; Jonathan Spence, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Gail Hershatter,
Andrew Nathan, and others consulted. One reason the film took so
long and cost so much was the care taken not to screw facts into
ready-made forms. David Carnochan edited with help from a book on
daily weather in Beijing during '89, making sure the 200 to 300
hours of new footage they collected were properly dated in the
chronology.

"We had some great material that we thought was shot on the
night of June 3," says Gordon, "But it turned out to be June 2
and we had to start over. David became an expert on reading the
sky for clues."

The most charged archival footage in the film is an interview
with Chai Ling on May 28, six days before the military crackdown.
[The
complete Chinese
transcript
of this interview is available on the Chinese Gate website.] The
tiny, frail 23-year-old graduate student, who emerged as
self-proclaimed Commander in Chief of Defend-Tiananmen Square-
headquarters, confesses to American journalist Philip Cunningham
her despair over the movement. Shot with a home video camera in a
Beijing hotel room, which adds a voyeurist seaminess to the
scene, Chai seems hysterical, understandable after a hunger
strike and with thousands of groups massed at the edge of the
city.

She thinks that other student leaders are "after my power" and
expresses the need to "resist compromise, resist these traitors."
Her despair with the movement has led her to the belief that
"you, the Chinese, are not worth my struggle! You are not worth
the sacrifice."

Finally, in words that sound eerily like a Weatherwoman who
thinks that only deadly backlash will expose the true face of
Fascist America, she says, "The students keep asking, 'What
should we do next? What can we accomplish?' I feel so sad,
because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for
is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice
but to brazenly butcher the people? Only when the Square is awash
with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then
will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to
my fellow students?"

This statement has turned into a sideshow of its own, with
Chai Ling and her supporters claiming that the Chinese word
"qidai" should be translated as "expect" rather that "hope for."
But even if this were true (and according to most translators, it
isn't), her other sentiments are peculiar enough.

Did the student leadership urge people to stay in the Square
for their own glorification, even after they suspected that the
PLA was willing to pull back again? Was a window of opportunity
closed in the middle of May, when small-scale democratic forums
might have been set up? Or was it inevitable that Li Peng's
hardliners would smash the moderates in the party?

The questions are crucial and still much debated in China.
Many intellectuals, such as Dai Qing, who appears in "The Gate of
Heavenly Peace," regard Chai Ling as "a criminal." The most
agonized figure in "Moving the Mountain" is Wang Xiaohua [sic],
who weeps because she feels responsible for leading young people
to slaughter. Wei Jingsheng, now in prison in China and the
leading intellectual figure of the Democracy Movement since the
'70s, has criticized the students for "acting foolishly." He did
not want to appear in "Moving the Mountain" according to the
research director on that film, Drew Hopkins, if Li Lu were to be
canonized, which is what happened.

Chai Ling, who eluded the police and has also
settled in Boston, refused many attempts to be interviewed for "The Gate of
Heavenly Peace". Nor would she speak to me. At first she was "too busy." When
I offered to call at another time, she said with fatigue, "It's over. I don't
want to get involved." Under her China Dialogue foundation, however, she has
gone about denouncing the film. Plugged into the human rights movement, she
advised Hillary Clinton, before her trip to Beijing for the International Women's
Conference, according to Gordon and Hinton. "If Washington listens to her, no
wonder things are so screwed up," grouses Hinton.

The uproar before the film was seen underlines the investment
that all sides had in their versions of the truth. Besides the
Chinese government, the Human Rights community also had something
to lose in a cold, hard look at certain facts. Having presented
the students who escaped to the U.S. as pure young idealists (a
process that reached its apotheosis in Li Lu, star of "Moving the
Mountain"), some worried that "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" would
come down too hard on Li and Chai Ling when, after all, the
government did the killing. Imagine a rumor that an upcoming film
would blame the students for what happened at Kent State.

In June 1995, two weeks after
Tiananmen
magazine appeared, with its attack on the film as well as on
"the overlord of the American media,
The New York Times," Gordon and Hinton got a call from Orville Schell who had heard
from Robert Bernstein. An active champion of human rights who
aided any number of Soviet rebels, including Sakharov, Bernstein
is the former head of Random House. Under his own imprint at John
Wiley, he publishes banned writers from around the world; he
controls the English-language rights to the writings of Wei
Jingsheng. (Bernstein's efforts have earned him the nickname,
"Dissident, Inc.")

"Bernstein and two other prominent human rights organization
executives held a conference call with Orville Schell (producer
on our film)," states Gordon in a letter to me. "They expressed
concern...about the way that Li Lu was going to be presented.
They demanded that we interview him for the film, and asked to
see transcripts relating to him. We responded that they should
see the film before passing judgment... and that our film was
complex. ... We most certainly were not 'blaming the students for
the massacre.'

"I was upset because... Sidney Jones [head of Asia Watch] and
Robin Munro [director of Asia Watch's Hong Kong office] had been
very helpful to us throughout the process of making the film. Bob
Bernstein himself had written a letter to Chai Ling on our
behalf, asking her to give us an interview. ... However I felt
that... based on his personal friendship with Li Lu, Bob had
crossed over a line. He is a very powerful man, and he was
applying a great deal of pressure on Orville Schell."

Gordon, Hinton, and Schell did not give in. But they agreed to
screen a rough cut for Bernstein and the two other concerned
members, if Barmé and Marilyn Young of NYU could also
attend. Bernstein canceled the meeting, though, when a screening
room supposedly could not be found.

Bernstein denies that any pressure was put on them. "I think
the film is wonderful," he says. "It should have been nominated
for an Academy Award."

But Gordon's account is backed up by a fax from Schell to the
filmmakers at that time (and now in possession of the Voice), as
well as by the testimony of Hinton and Barmé. Neither
Bernstein nor Schell would return my calls asking for
clarification.

No one can dispute Bernstein's stellar record in defense of
human rights around the world, or the catalogue of torture and
killing in China before and after '89. But a naive and uncritical
view of those events in the U.S. has led to its own distortions.
The veneration of Li Lu is a prime example.

The tailoring of Chinese dissidents for American consumption
would make a delicious study in radical chic. Barmé, who
has directed the Tiananmen Documentation Project at the
Australian National University since 1989, finds no evidence that
Li held any strong political convictions until he appeared in the
Square, three weeks before the massacre. From then on, he seems
to have done little except conspire with Chai Ling to suppress
moderate voices in the student movement. In the hagiography of Li
that is "Moving the Mountain" (directed by Michael Apted and
Sting's wife, Trudie Styler), his own self-importance ("I just
hope that when history calls I will be ready") seems matched only
by the need of the filmmakers to fashion a bright, attractive,
English-speaking "star." Drew Hopkins, who says he worked hard to
bring historical perspective to the film, describes the final
product as "shameful and sloppy. And that's too bad because it
didn't start out to be an ideological vehicle for Li Lu."

Stroked by Charlie Rose and puffed in
The New York Times, Li has become, as Gordon says, the "token dissident of New York
café society." The PR machine behind this man is
formidable. Don't miss the fawning "Talk of the Town" piece about
his graduation from Columbia Law and Business School in last
week's
New Yorker, in which the young dissident is compared to Nelson Mandela
after taking a stretch limo to a party thrown in his honor by
billionaire John Kluge. Neither the writer of the article, James
Traub, nor his editors found anything odd, not to say, sickening,
in equating a young man who basked a few weeks in the spotlight
of Tiananmen and is now entertaining offers from Lazard
Frères with a resister of conscience jailed for decades
because of his unshakable beliefs.

Those who went to prison in China for democracy, like Wang Dan
and Wei Jingsheng, continue to fight and make sacrifices that
those who fled did not. "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" in no way
condemns anyone for leaving. What American would dare? But in its
own incoherent fashion, "Moving the Mountain" asks the question:
Where is the best place to apply pressure on China? Wei Jingsheng
cautions that those dissenters who have left are condemning
themselves to alienation from the ongoing struggle. "It is like
bidding farewell to oneself," he says with a smile.

"We didn't have anything against Li Lu," explains
Barmé. "But he's nothing but a creation of the American
media. He was such a minor figure that we didn't think we needed
to interview him. He just didn't count."

The literary critic Liu Xiaobo, whose ironic views on '89 are
a highlight of the documentary, once wrote a mordant essay
entitled "That Holy Word, 'Revolution.'" He skewers his country
for its hopeless love affair with the concept throughout the 20th
century: "In Communist China there is no word more sacred or
richer in righteous indignation and moral force than 'revolution'
... Again and again in the name of 'revolution,' individuals have
been stripped of all the rights that they ought to enjoy.... Each
and every one of us is both victim and carrier of that word
'revolution.'"

He goes on to analyze the figure of the Communist Party ("If
it continues to uphold one-party despotism, it will perish"), and
toward the end discusses how and when to play the "June 4th card"
so that "those who rose to power on [its] blood" can be removed
and those who "fled overseas can safely return home." But he
closes by wondering "if we university students and intellectuals
who played the role of revolutionary saints and democratic stars
for two months can reasonable, calmly, justly, and realistically
reevaluate what we did and thought in 1989." Written in 1993, the
essay predicts all too well the volleys of denunciations that
have rained down on the first film to look critically at that
watershed year.

"The Gate of Heavenly Peace" is far from definitive. Without
the testimony of the Chinese government, which not surprisingly
declined Hinton's many requests for interviews, actions must be
inferred. Their silence (and Chai Ling's) also allows them to
safely dismiss the work as propaganda by a "bunch of
foreigners."

But the film also funnels everything through Tiananmen, when
the outrage in '89 had spread across the country, into every
major Chinese city. And impartiality can only take one so far in
understanding an event of this magnitude. In the film's cool
recital of what happened when, one misses the fact that to stand
up to power is often, by definition, to be a "criminal" and
"irresponsible."

Xiao Qiang, who joined Human Rights in China after watching
the turmoil of '89 from the U.S., can barely speak about
Tiananmen without clenching up. "It is so personal, my reaction
to this film," which he praises as "very important, the only one
of its kind that isn't sensationalistic." But he can't help but
feel dissatisfied to see it exhumed as dates and strategies.

"It wasn't only a political event," he says. "It was a moral
event, even spiritual, to me. We lived and grew up in a
repressive society. That moment of liberation, that feeling of
freedom in the spring of '89 was the first time people realized
what was missing. And then to be brutally crushed." He stops, his
voice breaking. "It wasn't just win or lose. June 4 created a new
attitude to life. It wasn't romantic, it was real."